February 24, 2016

Many profess to be determinists, but in practice they disregard it. p.xvii

"to proclaim that science is the search for causes ... is not to say that all events have them" p.xxiii

"...neutrality is also a moral attitude..." p.xxx

"...Hobbes, not Locke, turned out to be right: man sought neither happiness or liberty nor justice, but, above and before all,security." p.19

"Growing numbers of human beings are prepared to purchase this sense of security even at the cost of allowing vast tracts of life to be controlled by persons who, whether consciously or not, act systematically to narrow the horizon of human activity to manageable proportions, to train human beings into more easily combinable parts -- interchangeable, almost prefabricated -- of a total pattern." p.30, emphasis mine, this is exactly what I see when I observe college students at the local universities.

"For in the past there were conflicts of ideas; whereas what characterizes our time is less the struggle of one set of ideas against another than the mounting wave of hostility to all ideas as such. ...ideas are considered the source of too much disquiet..." p.32 Again, this is the attitude that prevails in all of our institutions.

"Has not every authoritarian institution, every irrationalist movement, been engaged upon something of this kind -- the artificial stilling of doubts, the attempt either to discredit uncomfortable questions or to educate men not to ask them? Was this not the practice of the great organized churches, indeed of every institution from the nation state to small sectarian establishments? Was this not the attitude of the enemies of reason from the earliest mystery cults to the romanticism, anarchistic nihilism, surrealism, neo-Oriental cults of the last century and a half? Why should our age be specially accused of addiction to the particular tendency which formed a central theme of social doctrines which go back to Plato, or the sect of the medieval Assassins, or much Eastern thought and mysticism?" [p.35-36]

"Where there is no choice there is no anxiety; and a happy release from responsibility. Some human beings have always preferred the peace of imprisonment, a contented security, a sense of having at last found one's proper place in the cosmos, to the painful conflicts and complexities of the disordered freedom of the world beyond the walls." [p.111-122]

I'll stop here as this book should be read in its entirety and all excerpts should be taken in context... Please note that there is a later edition with an additional essay...